Chris WiegmanThis week has been wild.
I don’t even know where to start that I can talk about other than to say my life is on a VERY different trajectory than it was with WordPress. Some of me finds it all exciting and amazing. Some of me is scared to death.
My goal now is to navigate it all without compromising the values that got me to this point. I just won’t do that and there have been moments that have made me pause.
That said, I stayed in WordPress so long, complete with the “WordPress tax” where orgs think it’s fine to pay sub-par wages because “it’s open source” and “it’s virtuous.” Those orgs and people were really just full of shit and using it all as an excuse to take advantage of people.
This tech is different. I’m still facing a little bias due to my WordPress background but I’ll win that over. There are still questionable issues on the part of the org too, but they’re honest about them. It’s the honesty that matters to me.
WordPress will always be special to me and much of my side work will continue to be around it. That said, the WordPress community is toxic and predatory. I spent way too long in it because it was somehow “better.” Fuck that. Show me the fucking money and, just tell me the damn truth. I feel like I’ve found those.
It’s funny that I say that. I’ve never been in tech for the money. I just want to be able to retire one day and build something that actually helps people. The “better” was the part where I thought WordPress would do that but, I was very wrong. If I’m going to put up with questionable people and toxic tech I’m not going to let myself be taken advantage of to do so. That’s why I had to get away from it.
The people I work with now seem to genuinely want to build something to protect people, in this case content creators, and I can get behind that. They’re also honest about wanting to make money off it. I can respect the honesty. No one sold me on this place with the “we’re like family” bullshit. No one tried to tell me how I had to sacrifice pay because of the virtues of open source. This place promised me hard work for a shared goal in a cool project at a fair price and… I’ll take that.
I don’t know where this path will go but, for the first time in a while, I have a real challenge to tackle and people who are honest about who they are to tackle it with. I’m here for it.